"I'm not anti-capitalist, but I don't think we've found the perfect system, either," she says. "I just want some kind of hope for young people starting out, who think the deck is stacked against them."

A month into the demonstrations that began in Lower Manhattan and have slowly spread to at least 145 other cities, attitudes about Occupy Wall Street have become a kind of political and cultural Rorschach test, in which the pattern one sees depends on the biases one brings. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., proclaimed the crowd a "mob," and Rush Limbaugh found them "perpetually lazy, spoiled rotten." President Obama said Sunday that Martin Luther King would have sympathized with the protests.

In the cold, hard world of statistics, economists say demonstrators' grievances are on the mark. At bottom, the protests are about how American middle-class life is undermined by four decades of near-stagnant wages for middle-income workers and a recession that has brought an unprecedented level of long-term unemployment. Throw in the exploding inflation in two of the most common expectations of middle-class life, health insurance and college — and a double-digit percentage decline in wages of young college graduates in the last decade — and the root causes of New York's Zuccotti Park become clear.

"These people are not just protesting for the hell of it," said Allen Sinai, chief economist at Decision Economics in New York, which consults for banks and hedge funds. "A lot of people don't have purple hair, but underneath, they feel what these people are saying. The middle class is under tremendous pressure."

Data on incomes, health insurance and employment show mainstream standards of living have been stagnant since the 1970s, with upward blips during expansions wiped out in downturns, after steady growth before 1973. The downturn since 2007 has made things worse.

Adjusted for inflation, median household income has fallen nearly 10% since December 2007, including a 6.7% drop since the recovery began in mid-2009, according to a study by Sentier Research in Annapolis, Md. The inflation-adjusted median income of wage- and salary-earning workers is $5 a week lower than in early 1979, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Some of the biggest recent income losses were for young college graduates, said Michael Mandel, chief economic strategist for the Washington-based Progressive Policy Institute. College-educated males ages 25 to 34 have seen incomes fall 19% since 2000, while similar women's incomes have dropped 16% since 2003, Mandel said. That's especially disturbing since youthful workers, with few attachments to home and résumés not limited by having deep but narrow experience, are highly adaptable, he said.

Access to health insurance has deteriorated for years. The average worker contribution to employer-sponsored coverage has nearly doubled since 1999, rising from $1,548, or $2,068 in today's dollars, to $4,128 this year for a family policy, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. That's enough to wipe out millions of middle-class raises. The number of uninsured Americans has risen 15% to more than 50 million since 2004, the foundation says.

The percentage of unemployed people out of work for six months or longer in this downturn has been the highest since records have been kept, dating to World War II. Including people involuntarily working part time or who have given up looking and aren't counted as unemployed, 16.5% of workers are unemployed or underemployed, the government says.

The inflation-adjusted cost of private colleges has risen 151% since 1981, and state schools have risen 140%, the College Board says. The average state university student who borrows money graduates with $19,800 in debt, and the average private college graduate who borrows has to pay back $26,100. A quarter of college students who borrow owe $35,000 or more.

"Even Republicans aren't denying this — the question is what to do about it," said Nelson Lichtenstein, a historian at the University of California-Santa Barbara. "It becomes a trump card to say they hate capitalism. In a way, saying that concedes that the raw data is there."

Common ground

On the ground, Occupy Wall Street is like Alice's Restaurant: Look around Zuccotti Park, and you can get anything you want. Seek out hippies, and shortly, you'll find a woman with purple-streaked hair opening a battered suitcase that appears to contain little but tie-dyed clothing and boxes of granola. Lots of people look like this, concentrated in an area clustered with sleeping bags, near musicians playing and people dancing. Look in the opposite direction, and there are families such as David Silver and Sarah Washburn, tourists from Oakland who brought their 2-year-old daughter, Siena.

"It's a misperception that we're not part of this because we're not uninsured or unemployed," said Washburn, 39, who works for TechSoup, which distributes donated computers and software to non-profits. "We're all on the precipice of being unemployed or uninsured."

Munching an apple, Silver, 43, a media studies professor, takes in the produce and snack stands a few yards away. With the mix of yuppies and long-haired kids on a weekday morning with no speeches going on, ambience is like an especially crunchy urban farmer's market. "It's like the parking lot at a Grateful Dead concert," says Silver.

The protests' Web presence has a lower percentage of oddballs and more stories of economic woe. At WeAreThe99percent.tumblr.com, nearly 2,000 anonymous testimonials chronicle wage cuts, college-loan overload and trouble finding and keeping jobs. Socialist declarations exist, but are few.

"All I want is a steady job," reads one. "We are the 99 percent."

Downwardly mobile

Protestors emphasize how ordinary their experiences are. Jon Reiner, 49, a Manhattan marketing executive laid off three times since 2001, said he was looking at his wedding photo recently and realized every groomsman had been through long-term unemployment or taken a lower-paying job after a layoff.

Out of work since 2007, he has relied on his schoolteacher wife for health insurance and wrote an award-winning article in Esquire about his 20-year battle with Crohn's disease, then turned it into a memoir, The Man Who Couldn't Eat. He spends time with other stay-at-home dads in the school playground. He has more company now.

"None of us can afford to give up," he said. "Statistically and anecdotally, my experience is representative. Fourteen million people are unemployed, and another 12 million are people like me who are considered to have given up because our unemployment benefits have expired. But we haven't given up. Employers have given up on us."

As protests spread, participants say they're getting support from unexpected places. Smiling tourists wave as their buses pass. Wolfe's boyfriend, Doug Johnson, said his father, a Republican who owns a landscaping business, called to buck him up.

"He said a lot of what we're saying, he's been saying for years," said Johnson, a 28-year-old graphic designer without health insurance, who was motivated to come by the $600-a-week list price of treatments for psoriasis, with which he was diagnosed in July. (He gets aid through a private program for uninsured patients.) That's almost as much as he takes home in a week, Johnson said. "We should have jobs, I do have a job, but I'm still here," he said. "It's part of the American dream. The reason we haven't achieved it is not standing up for our rights."

Protest organizers have offered few solutions to rekindle middle-class opportunity. On the ground, Silver is unimpressed with both political parties, saying their proposals don't address long-term problems. Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist who addressed the Occupy Wall Street crowd last Saturday, agreed. He promoted building infrastructure and improving education, banking on big, indirect, long-term payoffs.

"A problem that's 38 years old isn't going to be solved by one year of stimulus or (GOP presidential candidate) Mitt Romney's tax cut," Sachs said, referring to household incomes having peaked by some measures in 1973. "The Republican program would take us even further down the long decline we've been experiencing, and unfortunately, Obama is proposing gimmicks."

Kate Wolfe doesn't want anything radical. She says her student loans are her own doing, laughing that leaving her Maryland home to pay out-of-state tuition at Penn State was "my $100,000 mistake." It's the poor prospects for people her age to get ahead with a reasonable effort that bothers her. "I'm glad we went to college. I'm glad we work hard," she said. "We can do it now, work 80 hours a week in our twenties. But I don't want to do it in our forties."

A few minutes earlier, David Silver said he saw the first glimmers of change in a Senate vote scheduled that day on a proposal by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., to raise taxes on people who make more than $1 million a year.

The bill fell 10 votes short of the 60 needed to avert a filibuster.

"Just two or three weeks ago, all the talk was about spending cuts," Silver said. "That whole pendulum has changed."

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